Apocalypse bébé is set up as a fairly straightforward crime story - the narrator, Lucie Tolédo, is a plodding private detective who finds herself out of her depth when Valentine, the teenage subject of a routine surveillance job, suddenly goes missing. To help find her, she enlists a legendary Big Scary Lesbian Detective known in the trade as "La Hyène", happily switching to the Dr Watson role for herself.

Lucie's first-person narrative, with its noir affectation of detachment and superficiality, is intercut with third-person chapters from the point of view of other characters in the story, where we bore down at leisure into the depths of their personalities, with an airy disregard for the strict timekeeping requirements that normally apply to crime fiction. And we get to see the author's supreme contempt for just about everybody: Valentine's bourgeois novelist father, her dim but well-meaning stepmother, her beautiful but vain and selfish birth-mother, her pointlessly aggressive Muslim cousin, the various people on the right and left who try to take advantage of her whilst pretending to help. Even the superb Hyène turns out to have an untouchable dark spot in her background. And, just before it happens, we realise that all this bad stuff is piling up on top of a fifteen-year-old girl who, remarkable though she is, isn't in the least equipped to deal with it. And something really bad is going to happen as a result.

The very black message of the plot is, however, destabilised in turn by the lively rhythms of Despentes's prose, which turn the flatfooted profanities and clichés of street French into something that feels incongruously subversive and funny. As long as humans can turn a handful of words into a gesture of rebellion, we are meant to feel, all hope for our society can't be entirely lost. ( )

I read this book as an electronic advance reading copy provided by Edelweiss, and I have sent my comments to the publisher via that web site.

A flimsy story about two private investigators--one utterly incompetent and disengaged, the other hyperviolent and preternaturally perceptive--on the hunt for a missing teenager is a pretext for lots of ranting about modern France, neoconservatives, neoliberals, immigration, terrorism, and technology. At times the writing is clever and incisive, but it is also long-winded and can be incoherent. ( )

PRIX RENAUDOT 2010 : Valentine Galtan, adolescente énigmatique et difficile, a disparu. La narratrice, Lucie, anti-héroïne trentenaire, détective privée sans conviction ni talent, engagée par la grand-mère de Valentine pour surveiller ses faits et gestes, l'a perdue sur un quai de métro parisien. Comment la retrouver ? Que faire des édifiantes photos de Valentine qui la montrent si expérimentée avec les garçons ? Aurait-elle rejoint à Barcelone cette mère qu'elle n'a jamais connue ? Le mieux pour Lucie serait de faire équipe avec la Hyène, une 'privée 'aux méthodes radicales, une femme puissante, au corps souple plein d'une violence qui s'exprime par saccades : moyennant finances et aussi par amusement, La Hyène accepte le marché. Voici les collègues mal appariées, l'une lesbienne volcanique, l'autre hétéro à basse fréquence qui traversent la France et l'Espagne jusqu'à Barcelone à la recherche de la petite fugueuse. ( )

Drôle, violent, noir, décapant, trash jusqu'au bout! ( )

Un peu trashy, un peu paresseux, mais au final bien sympathique ( )